Due Diligence

“Gen AI is kind of new, but not all of it. We have 2 000 people doing it. We spend $2 billion a year on it. It affects everything: risk, fraud, marketing, idea generation, customer service. And it’s the tip of the iceberg.” – Jamie Dimon –  JP Morgan Chase CEO

This comment reflects the culmination of over a decade of accelerated investment and hands-on integration of machine learning and intelligent automation within the bank. JPMorgan Chase has been consistently ahead of its peers: by institutionalising AI and harnessing both mature machine learning systems and the latest generative AI models, the bank directs efforts not only towards operational efficiency, but also towards deeper transformation in client service and risk management. With an annual spend of $2 billion and a dedicated workforce of more than 2,000 AI professionals, JPMorgan Chase’s implementation spans from fraud detection and risk modelling through to marketing, client insight, coding automation, and contract analytics—with generative AI driving new horizons in these areas.

Dimon’s “tip of the iceberg” metaphor underscores a strategic recognition that, despite substantial results to date, the majority of possibilities and business impacts from AI adoption—particularly generative AI—lie ahead, both for JPMorgan Chase and the wider global banking sector.

About Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon is one of the most influential global banking leaders of his generation. Born in Queens, New York, into a family with deep Wall Street roots, he earned a Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School. His early professional years were shaped under Sanford I. Weill at American Express, where Dimon soon became a trusted lieutenant.

Rising through the ranks, Dimon played strategic roles at Commercial Credit, Primerica, Travelers, Smith Barney, and Citigroup, pioneering some of the largest and most consequential mergers on Wall Street through the 1990s. Dimon’s leadership style—marked by operational discipline and strategic vision—framed his turnaround of Bank One as CEO in 2000, before orchestrating Bank One’s transformative merger with JPMorgan Chase in 2004.

He has led JPMorgan Chase as CEO and Chairman since 2006, overseeing the company’s expansion to $4 trillion in assets and positioning it as a recognised leader in investment banking, commercial banking, and financial innovation. Through the global financial crisis, Dimon was noted for prudent risk management and outspoken industry leadership. He sits on multiple influential boards and business councils, and remains a voice for free market capitalism and responsible corporate governance, with periodic speculation about his potential political aspirations.

Theorists and Pioneers in Generative AI

Dimon’s remarks rest on decades of foundational research and development in AI from theory to practice. Key figures responsible for the rapid evolution and commercialisation of generative AI include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio
  Often referred to as the ‘godfathers of deep learning’, these researchers advanced core techniques in neural networks—especially deep learning architectures—that make generative AI possible. Hinton’s breakthroughs in backpropagation and LeCun’s convolutional networks underlie modern generative models. Bengio contributed key advances in unsupervised and generative learning. Their collective work earned them the 2018 Turing Award.

• Ian Goodfellow
  As inventor of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in 2014, Goodfellow created the first popular architecture for synthetic data generation—training two neural networks adversarially so that one creates fake data and the other tries to detect fakes. GANs unlocked capabilities in art, image synthesis, fraud detection, and more, and paved the way for further generative AI advances.

• Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, and the OpenAI team
  Their leadership at OpenAI has driven widespread deployment of large language models such as GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4. These transformer-based architectures demonstrated unprecedented text generation, contextual analysis, and logical reasoning—essential for many AI deployments in financial services, as referenced by Dimon.

• Demis Hassabis (DeepMind)
  With advances in deep reinforcement learning and symbolic AI, Hassabis’ work at DeepMind has influenced the use of generative AI in problem-solving, optimisation, and scientific modelling—a model frequently referenced in financial risk and strategy.

• Fei-Fei Li, Andrew Ng, and the Stanford lineage
  Early research in large-scale supervised learning and the creation of ImageNet established datasets and benchmarking methods crucial for scaling generative AI solutions in real-world business contexts.

These theorists’ work ensures that generative AI is not a passing trend, but the result of methodical advances in algorithmic intelligence—now entering practical, transformative use cases across the banking and professional services landscape. The strategic embrace by large corporates, as described by Jamie Dimon, thus marks a logical next step in the commercial maturity of AI technologies.

Summary:
Jamie Dimon’s quote reflects JPMorgan Chase’s scale, seriousness, and strategic commitment to AI—and in particular to generative AI—as the next engine of business change. This stance is underpinned by Dimon’s career of financial leadership and by the foundational work of global theorists who have made practical generative AI possible.